From a descriptive point of view, literally is seenas ‘a case of semantic change in progress’ (Israel, 2002: 424),exemplified through the shift from uses such as This wordliterally means ‘water’ to This book literallyblew my mind. This process of change has been noticedand commented on by language commentators and usage guide writers.In other words, apart from being a case of change in progress,literally is also a usage problem. Usageproblems are ‘features of divided usage’, or ‘instances of usagethat have attracted sociolinguistic controversy’ (Tieken–Boon vanOstade, 2015: 57; cf. Kostadinova, 2018). The case of the wordliterally, then, lends itself to aninvestigation of the relationship between prescriptive approaches tolanguage use typically found in usage guides, and processes oflanguage variation and change, as I will do in this paper. As acrucial aspect to this discussion, I will also address some of theattitudes speakers hold towards the newer uses ofliterally, as attitudes of speakers can help usbetter understand why prescriptivism may or may not influencelanguage variation and change. In what follows, I will first discussthe variant uses of literally found in present-dayEnglish, and then consider findings on three perspectives on thevariation in the use of literally, viz. the ‘usageguide’ perspective, the ‘actual use’ perspective and the ‘speakers’attitudes’ perspective.

I had never given much consideration to the influence of the Microsoft Word grammar and style checker on the average Microsoft Word user. Perhaps that is because I never felt quite bothered by it; as someone who has studied English for almost twenty years now, I always felt I could make my own decisions when it comes to grammar and style matters in English. This feeling, however, changed recently when, in a matter of days, the Microsoft Word grammar and style checker on my recently purchased laptop started disliking all my passive constructions, and suggested that I should replace them with active clauses. I was not impressed. (And even as I am writing this, a lot of the passive constructions in this text are underlined as ‘errors’.)

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

A couple of years ago, a few major news websites, such as those of The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail, reported that the non-literal use of literally, as in ‘This book literally blew my mind’, was officially recognised as legitimate usage by Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries Online and the Oxford English Dictionary. As often happens in today's online media, the news went viral. Language users and language pundits alike condemned the dictionary addition of what they regard as an ‘erroneous’ use of the word. The only problem was that this was not really news. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, had officially added this meaning of literally in 2011, dating the first such recorded usage back to 1769.